There’s a chill in the air, and the leaves are falling off the trees en masse. You know what that means: It’s time for AMD’s huge annual Radeon software update. Like 2014’s Catalyst Omega and 2015’s Radeon Software Crimson, this year’s refresh packs in some huge new features and extends some existing ones—like the superb Radeon WattMan overclocking tool—to more graphics cards.

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GamesSoftwareHalo 5: Forge's multiplayer is now more accessible on PC with a new custom game browserWed, 07 Dec 2016 11:14:00 -0800Hayden DingmanHayden Dingman

When Halo 5: Forge launched on PC over the summer I think many people went through the same set of events as I did: 1) Download it, excited. Free Halo multiplayer! 2) Notice it’s impossible to set up a match unless your Xbox friends are also online. 3) Delete it.

It was a shame. Here was Halo multiplayer on the PC, at long last, but practically unplayable without any sort of matchmaking or server browser. And to be fair, Microsoft did tell us that Forge was more about creating custom maps than playing them. It just did so while dangling the idea of playing them in front of us.

Get your Needlers ready, though. As part of a massive Halo 5 console patch releasing this week, Halo 5: Forge finally gets that much-needed custom game browser. From the patch notes:

Ubisoft has given away some truly excellent games in 2016 to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Since June, players have been able to scoop up free copies of Beyond Good & Evil, Rayman Legends, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and more. So what classic gem did they choose to end on?

Assassin’s Creed III, a.k.a. The Most Boring Assassin’s Creed. Well, maybe slightly less boring than the original, but that’s not saying much at all. Starring the bland and incredibly petulant Connor in his quest to sleep through all his lines, Assassin’s Creed III takes you to all the best parts of the American Revolution and then steers you through the most generic missions it can think of.

Bear with me for a bit. I’m going to get around to Watch Dogs 2, but it’s going to be by way of a semi-lengthy tangent into Assassin’s Creed—particularly, what Assassin’s Creed II meant to that now-juggernaut of a series.

It’s easy to forget, with almost a decade of sequels under our belt, that there was a time when Assassin’s Creed could’ve conceivably died off. Early on, too. After garnering quite a bit of hype, the original Assassin’s Creed released in 2007 to middling reviews. “Disappointing,” said many, or “Repetitive.” It had some great ideas, but was a boring mess of a game.

That might have been the end, but no. Assassin’s Creed II released in 2009, ushering in the “Ubisoft Formula” that propelled the publisher to new heights and then became the butt of industry jokes: 1) Climb towers 2) Unlock a million icons on the map 3) Grind out some missions 4) Repeat. Sure, it’s trite now, but at the time it marked a huge shift in the open-world genre.

That said, it's lightly less busted after installing the new 1.2 patch that released on Tuesday. But things still aren’t great by any means. I’m still seeing wild frame rate swings, from 100+ down to 50 on Ultra settings with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti at 1080p, depending on where I am and what I’m looking at. Worse is that the settings still seem like window dressing. Frame rates stay almost exactly the same regardless of whether I’m on Ultra or Very Low, and the game relies on console-style upscaling as a crutch.

There’s an easy way to judge “Builder”-style games, I think—maybe not the most scientific way, but certainly a gut-level instinct: Was there a moment while playing where I looked up to find that it was 4 in the morning and I should probably have gone to sleep hours ago?

And if we’re judging Planet Coaster on that criteria, then it’s a stunning success.

Six Flags wasn’t built in a day

Technically there were two different theme park builders released last week—Planet Coaster, our main concern for this review, being one. The other was RollerCoaster Tycoon World ($35 on Steam), which I don’t think is quite as bad as the reputation it’s racked up on Steam but does seem to have been rushed out the door in some weird attempt to “beat” Planet Coaster to the punch.

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that this whole near-future and not-so-near-future experiment has been something of a misstep for Call of Duty.

Last year’s Black Ops III was a decent enough shooter, reworking the existential angst of the Cold War for an era of AI soldiers and virtual battlefields. But it’s the exception, the lone slightly-brighter spot in an increasingly tedious trajectory arcing through Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, and now Infinite Warfare.

We used to talk about “Call of Duty killers.” Little did we know Call of Duty would kill itself.

To infinity and beyond

It starts out well enough. Like many people, I actually watched Infinite Warfare’s E3 trailer with some amount of intrigue. “What is this game? It looks gorgeous,” I wondered, ships zipping around through the inky vacuum of space. And the campaign opens with some of that magic as your team plummets through Europa’s thin atmosphere to the icy surface.

Imagine a world in peril. Kyros, the overlord, dominates everything in the known world—except for one tiny realm, that is. Known as the Tiers, this last bastion of goodness, of freedom, holds out in the face of impossible odds. Armies clash, and Kyros’s overwhelming forces handily dispatching the desperate populace until all hope seems lost.

In a normal video game, this would be the point where your untrained, unskilled, and unknown Joe Nobody enters the picture to save the day, to beat back the tides of darkness, confront Kyros, and eventually defeat him.

Not in Tyranny, though.

Sympathy for the devil

In Tyranny, the latest isometric CRPG from Obsidian (following Pillars of Eternity), you work for Kyros. You are the bad guy, or at least one of his many servants. You play as a Fatebinder, an enforcer of the empire’s (often heinous) laws. Obsidian likened the Fatebinders to Judge Dredd the first time they showed us the game, and I’m going to stick with that. It’s an apt description—police force for a brutal and absolutist regime.

Rusty Lake Hotel is one of those rare games I played completely at random. Earlier this year I was browsing Steam’s new releases, loved the art (weirdly reminiscent of a cartoon American Gothic), grabbed it, forgot about it for a few months, and then booted it up one night on a whim. And what I got was one of the best adventure games of 2016.

The mundane nature of Rusty Lake Hotel’s puzzles sat in stark contrast to its grim undertones, a darkly humorous story about guests being killed off at a Victorian Era hotel. Oh, except you’re the murderer, the guests are all animals, and every time you kill one off (always in bizarre fashion) the other guests eat the corpse.

Before we get started, let’s just all agree that releasing Titanfall 2 the week between Battlefield 1 (which is quite good) and Call of Duty: Dumb Subtitle (which will sell regardless) was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. Such an awful idea that I kept expecting EA to last-minute delay Titanfall 2 to...pretty much any other month.

No such luck. Titanfall 2 releases as scheduled, in between two juggernaut shooters (one of which is also published by EA), and it’s a bad omen for a sequel to a game that’s world-renowned for rapidly losing its multiplayer audience the first time around.

Just like that, five days are gone. I fell into quite a few “One More Turn” traps over the weekend, looked up more than once to realize it was past 3 A.M., and I come before you now having made my way through three Civilization VI campaigns.

I’ve got thoughts, both good and bad. But I’ll say this up front: Civilization VI ($60 on Steam or Amazon) is better than Civilization V was at launch.

All roads lead to nukes

A hell of a lot better, really. Oh, the honeymoon’s already worn off and people have started complaining that “Civilization VI isn’t as good as Civilization V with all its expansion packs.” The cycle continues, and I’m sure Firaxis will release at least two expansions (and then an all-encompassing Gold Edition) over the next couple years to fix some of Civ VI’s weaker points.

“If history only remembers one in a thousand of us, then the future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did. How we lived, how we fought, and how we died. When this is all over and the war is won, they will remember us.”

These solemn lines close out Battlefield 1’s campaign, and it’s as bittersweet a note as I can think to start this review on. (You can also watch the YouTube video below to see me play through the game’s first mission.)

Total warfare

Because the truth is we haven’t remembered. Not enough of us, anyway. To put a twist on a Churchill quote, “Never has so much been owed by so many to so many.” Be it because World War I is too distant a part of our past or because the horror was too great or simply because it was overshadowed by its follow-up twenty years later, the so-called “War to end all wars” doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.

There’s a chill in the air, and the leaves are falling off the trees en masse. You know what that means: It’s time for AMD’s huge annual Radeon software update. Like 2014’s Catalyst Omega and 2015’s Radeon Software Crimson, this year’s refresh packs in some huge new features and extends some existing ones—like the superb Radeon WattMan overclocking tool—to more graphics cards.

]]>http://www.pcworld.com/article/3147292/software-games/feature-stuffed-radeon-software-crimson-relive-debuts-amds-rivals-to-shadowplay-fraps.html#tk.rss_softwaregames
GamesSoftwareHalo 5: Forge's multiplayer is now more accessible on PC with a new custom game browserWed, 07 Dec 2016 11:14:00 -0800Hayden DingmanHayden Dingman

When Halo 5: Forge launched on PC over the summer I think many people went through the same set of events as I did: 1) Download it, excited. Free Halo multiplayer! 2) Notice it’s impossible to set up a match unless your Xbox friends are also online. 3) Delete it.

It was a shame. Here was Halo multiplayer on the PC, at long last, but practically unplayable without any sort of matchmaking or server browser. And to be fair, Microsoft did tell us that Forge was more about creating custom maps than playing them. It just did so while dangling the idea of playing them in front of us.

Get your Needlers ready, though. As part of a massive Halo 5 console patch releasing this week, Halo 5: Forge finally gets that much-needed custom game browser. From the patch notes:

Ubisoft has given away some truly excellent games in 2016 to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Since June, players have been able to scoop up free copies of Beyond Good & Evil, Rayman Legends, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and more. So what classic gem did they choose to end on?

Assassin’s Creed III, a.k.a. The Most Boring Assassin’s Creed. Well, maybe slightly less boring than the original, but that’s not saying much at all. Starring the bland and incredibly petulant Connor in his quest to sleep through all his lines, Assassin’s Creed III takes you to all the best parts of the American Revolution and then steers you through the most generic missions it can think of.

If an AI could rule a world, would you trust it to manage your IT systems? German software company Arago is hoping you will.

The developer of IT automation system Hiro (short for Human Intelligence Robotically Optimized) has been teaching its software how to play Freeciv, an open source computer strategy game inspired by Sid Meier's Civilization series of games, and in the process is learning to make IT management more fun.

Hiro is an AI-based automation system that usually sits on top of other IT service management tools. Unlike script-based systems, it learns from its users how best to manage a company's IT systems.

Dead Rising 4 reviews appeared yesterday, but you’d be forgiven if you thought the game was a console exclusive. So far as I can tell nobody received access to the PC version until...well, yesterday morning. It does exist though, and it releases today on the Windows 10 Store. No, not Steam. Just the Windows 10 Store.

I fully expect some of you just closed out of this tab with disgust, though it’s worth noting that Dead Rising is a Capcom property, not first-party Microsoft, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a full Steam release in about six months. (See also: Quantum Break.)

Internet-connected toys subject children to hidden marketing messages and allow strangers to converse with them from a distance, consumer rights groups say.

The groups highlighted breaches of security and basic consumer rights in two toys in particular, the i-Que robot and the My Friend Cayla doll.

The toys connect via Bluetooth to smartphone apps that record children speaking and transmit the recordings to a voice recognition service provider in the U.S., Nuance Communications, allowing the toys to appear to converse with the children.

But, the consumer groups say, there is no authentication or pairing of the Bluetooth connections, allowing strangers within radio range of the toys to detect them and connect with them to carry on a conversation with the children directly. Furthermore, they say, voice recordings that could contain personal information are transmitted to Nuance without explicit consent, and the toys inject messages into their conversations repeatedly endorsing Disney products.

OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, wants to let AIs loose in their own universe, where they can learn to play games, use apps and interact with websites.

Universe is the name of OpenAI's tool for training AIs on, as it puts it, "any task a human can complete with a computer." Using a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) remote desktop, it allows the AI to control the game or app using a virtual keyboard and mouse, and to see its output by analyzing the pixels displayed on the screen. It's essentially an interface to the company's Gym toolkit for developing reinforcement algorithms, a type of machine learning system.

Bear with me for a bit. I’m going to get around to Watch Dogs 2, but it’s going to be by way of a semi-lengthy tangent into Assassin’s Creed—particularly, what Assassin’s Creed II meant to that now-juggernaut of a series.

It’s easy to forget, with almost a decade of sequels under our belt, that there was a time when Assassin’s Creed could’ve conceivably died off. Early on, too. After garnering quite a bit of hype, the original Assassin’s Creed released in 2007 to middling reviews. “Disappointing,” said many, or “Repetitive.” It had some great ideas, but was a boring mess of a game.

That might have been the end, but no. Assassin’s Creed II released in 2009, ushering in the “Ubisoft Formula” that propelled the publisher to new heights and then became the butt of industry jokes: 1) Climb towers 2) Unlock a million icons on the map 3) Grind out some missions 4) Repeat. Sure, it’s trite now, but at the time it marked a huge shift in the open-world genre.

Got a game in your Steam library that you no longer play and just want gone? Maybe you bought something that turned out to be awful and you just don’t want to see it ever again. No problem: You can now easily remove games from your Steam library for good.

The news comes via user Enter the Dragon Punch on the NeoGAF forums, who came across the new perma-delete feature while visiting Steam’s tech support section. The newfound ability to permanently delete a game is a vast improvement over the old state of affairs, as PCGamer notes, which required you to get in touch with Steam’s support team.

I haven’t been much of a gamer in recent years, but I’ve always liked the idea of being one. That feeling intensified when I got my first glimpse of the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront. Then when I saw the Fallout 4 trailer, I knew I had to start gaming again.

But I quickly stumbled across a major problem: The only PC I have is a 2011 ThinkPad X220 with Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics. That just wasn’t going to cut it for proper PC gaming.

Google, one of the largest and most influential tech companies on the planet, decided to enter the virtual reality space with a smartphone shell made of cardboard. True story! It gave away a kit to Google I/O attendees in 2014, and then posted the plans online so anyone with an empty pizza box or stray shipping carton could hack together a lo-fi VR device with a handful of cheap parts.

Cardboard might sound silly, but it has caught on in a serious way: the plans have been downloaded more than 500,000 times, there are dozens upon dozens of compatible apps, and now LG and Mattel are creating plastic versions. You can even buy a standard cardboard viewer from third-party companies if you don’t want to make one yourself.

The Xbox One is strong video-game platform, and it's a conduit to all sorts of fabulous online entertainment for those looking to cut the cord. But did you know you can also use Microsoft's gaming console to control your cable- or satellite-TV set-top box using voice and gesture commands? Allow me to show you how.

Xbox in the middle

The Xbox One has an HDMI output. No surprise, right? So does every other device you plug into your TV. But the Xbox One also has an HDMI input. Unplug the HDMI cable going from your cable- or satellite-TV set-top to your TV (or A/V receiver, as the case may be) and plug it into the HDMI input on your Xbox One.